Re: Gtk+ printing dialog highlevel thoughts

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2006-01-23 at 11:48 +0000, Bill Haneman wrote: 
> Alexander Larsson wrote:
> >Nobody is going to render their paper output with theme colors, that
> >just isn't the way apps are set up (i.e. the printing output is not
> >coupled to the current on-screen settings). So I think it will be hard
> >to do it like this. Maybe we could just invert the pixmap before we
> >paint it in the preview or something like that.
> >  
> >
> No Alex, that won't do.  The fact that users won't render paper output 
> this way doesn't matter; what matters is that for some users, the "print 
> preview" must be themed rather than WYSIWYG.

Of course I didn't mean people would render paper output this way. When
I say "Nobody" it meant "no developers of applications that print".

The fact is that applications print documents, and applications do not
select colors of elements in a document based on theme settings in the
current display, they select them based on the data in the document.

> The print preview mechanism MUST be theme-aware, or at least themeable 
> (i.e. fg and bg colors must be speciable via the theme).  This is a 
> "hard" (i.e. firm) accessibility requirement, I didn't make it up :-)

When you say that this is a "hard" requirement, from where did this
requirement come?

We can easily let you specify the background of the print preview
widget, but there is no "fg" involved. The page contents is gonna be
whatever the application prints. We could add a token "get_fg_color"
method somewhere, but in practice apps wouldn't call it, because a
document has no concept of "fg color". Take a word processor document
where the user selected various colors for various parts of the text.
Which parts are "fg"? In fact, setting fg to white and bg to black in
such a setup is likely to mean black text on black background in most
apps/documents.

Does any other system handle this? For sure, having looked at windows
and OSX neither of their printing APIs they seem to have a way to get at
any sort of screen properties in their page rendering APIS.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a Nobel prize-winning overambitious farmboy on the wrong side of the law. 
She's a vivacious extravagent Valkyrie with a knack for trouble. They fight 
crime!